Boiling the Ocean

Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summer’s convergence of extreme events makes it feel like we’re living in a CGI-laden disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all offer the same material comfort: an ending. What we’re experiencing is different.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Heat Is Here

I’m a sucker for summer. All year long I look forward to that plume of hot-dog smoke emanating from a Weber grill, that satisfying clunk the moment you close the lid of an icy cooler. I’m even strangely okay with that shirt-soaking humidity.

And yet, the first half of summer 2023 has tainted my nostalgia. Last month’s Blade Runner sky wasn’t merely eerie; it was downright depressing. All across the country, so many summer rites of passage seem to be vanishing, whether we’re ready to admit it or not.

In Austin, Texas, this week, a fire battalion chief measured a local playground slide at 130 degrees, practically hot enough to cause a second-degree burn within seconds. Last night in one part of the Florida Keys, the sea-surface temperature came close to 97 degrees. On Saturday, the Northwest Territories of Canada—up near the Arctic Ocean—hit 100 degrees. Last week was officially the hottest week ever recorded on Earth.

All these numbers and stats easily start to blur. When everything’s a disaster, many of us become numb to climate-change news. But consider the following: 54 million Americans could experience triple-digit weather this week. Phoenix, Arizona, may break its all-time record for consecutive days above 110 degrees. Death Valley could hit a whopping 130 on Sunday. None of this is a mere inconvenience. It can be lethal. The climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First, described the experience of walking 10 blocks in Phoenix on a 115-degree day in a recent essay: “After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner.”

Even our memories of “cooler” places may be out of sync with our present reality. Last Friday, on a family vacation at the Jersey shore, I swam in the disconcertingly warm Atlantic Ocean. I came back to work yesterday still sort of dumbfounded, so I emailed the climatologist Michael Mann looking for clarity.

Even if you don’t know Mann, you might know his work. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, which illustrates the massive, sudden jump in temperatures during the 20th century, has become one of the defining figures in climate science.

Mann told me he had been vacationing on the eastern shore of Virginia last weekend and noticed that the water there was likewise unseasonably warm. But in his view, hotter ocean water is less about the sun or external temperature than we might assume. “This probably has more to do with variability in the ocean currents,” he said in an email. “Several weeks ago, the waters off the East Coast of the U.S. were cold and the waters in the eastern Atlantic were very warm. Now we have a bit of the reverse, with the East Coast waters having warmed up quite a bit. I suspect it has to do with the direction the Gulf stream is taking,” he wrote.

Some observers have speculated that rising sea-surface temperatures contributed to other recent extreme weather events around the country, namely heavy rain in the Northeast. That’s the other thing to consider: It’s not just heat. Streets in Montpelier, Vermont, were heavily flooded with muddy water after more than five inches of rain fell yesterday. On Sunday, in New York’s Hudson Valley, bridges collapsed and roads were washed out. (The U.S. Military Academy in West Point clocked around eight inches of rain.)

Mann pointed out that “climate change is leading to anomalous warmth around the planet in general, and warmer ocean waters mean more moisture in the atmosphere that is available to produce flooding rains.” He noted that the “stalled jet stream” is also a factor in what we’re seeing. You may recall the term jet stream from news reports about the Canadian wildfire smoke that parked itself over the Northeast and Midwest in recent weeks. As jet-stream behavior changes, other things start to change—so far, it seems, for the worse. A few weeks ago, the spare N-95 mask I had kept in my backpack for visits to the doctor’s office became an essential (if imperfect) layer against breathing wildfire particulate matter.

But the truth is that once the smoke moved on, I threw it out. I’m embarrassingly among the millions who momentarily pause to glimpse at climate news immediately after these weather events, then it’s back to more near-term concerns. I asked Mann how climatologists like himself deal with the frustration of this reality.

“It is a frustration for sure,” he wrote. “The modern 24-hour news cycle is unkind to challenges—like the climate crisis—which require diligence and concerted action, day after day, week after week, year after year.”

From a practical standpoint, how should an average person conceive of all these extremes? What are non-climatologists supposed to do? Should we mentally brace for hotter summers and skin-burning playground slides for the rest of our lives?

“We should understand that the choice is ours,” Mann wrote. “We can make it much worse by continuing our reliance on fossil fuels. Or we can rapidly decarbonize our economy, prevent a worsening of many if not all of these impacts, and remain within our collective adaptive capacity as a civilization.”

The challenge of adapting is not unlike the challenge of fighting the human urge to succumb to nostalgia. It’s easier, and far more comfortable, to pine for the way things used to be. It’s undoubtedly wiser to accept that we no longer live in the world we grew up in.

Related:

Today’s News

Evening Read

Beware the Luxury Beach Resort

By Lauren Groff

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Culture Break

Watch. The League, a new documentary that examines how the Negro leagues shaped modern baseball (in theaters now, and available to stream on Apple TV+ and Prime Video on July 14).

Listen. To “Taylor’s Version” of “Better Than Revenge,” by Taylor Swift, which features new lyrics.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

After all that climate-change gloom, I’d encourage you to give the new album from the instrumental guitarist Hayden Pedigo a spin. Cheekily titled The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Pedigo’s latest record makes for a great summer-night soundtrack. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a fan of instrumental music, this one may work for you. It’s not “background music”; it’s contemplative but somehow never snobby, and eminently accessible. Rather than try to impress you with his shredding skills, Pedigo constructs delicate songs—he’s a storyteller without words. And as the music video linked above will show you, he’s also a pretty big goof.

— John

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.